Eileen says working hard every day AND seeing progress is what makes the difference.

My husband became a warrior in September of this year. He’s shipped me out so I could become a warrior too. Wow, there’s plenty of challenges that we meet on a daily basis. The majority come from the fact that neither he nor I have an air conditioning background. He is a corporate guy and I am a school teacher. We start with that. We really on our employees to do the majority of the hands-on for us. We are trapped by our employees because we rely on them so much. We are here to help us learn to manage those employees.

Culture is good but can always be improved. Sales, we need alignment like you would not believe. Accountability, there is none. I think a big part of that is Tom and I need to learn to become accountable for everybody. It’s not their fault; it’s ours. I use that at my own house. If my kids do something wrong, I hold myself accountable. I haven’t done that at work. Guess what’s going to start happening?

Mike is incredibly confident. I am always impressed when somebody asks a question. Take a step back. When we sat through his interviews, I’m confident he knew the questions he was going to ask each person before that person even stood up. He knew those questions because he had already thought about what is it I need, what am I looking for. That is what I find that makes him superior to others, because he has the confidence and he really knows what he’s talking about. He’s proved it. Look where I am. I am in his building and he has proved that he can grow a company from a chock in a truck. Look at where he’s at now.

The part that has impacted me the most is his employees. Just walking through the office you can tell everybody knew what their job was. Everybody knew what was expected of them. Nobody looked confused or nobody looked like they wanted to sit back and cross their legs and wait for something to happen. You see it in the warehouse. You can it from the guys driving their trucks up. Everybody’s on the same page. It’s pretty apparent they all enjoy being here. I’m guessing they weren’t all coached up before we showed up.

I’ll tell you right now the biggest excuse anybody would say no is the cost. Believe it or not, we just got a new software in our office. We were paper and pencil. We started the software and there’s training coming up next month. I said I couldn’t do it because of the cost. Guess who’s going to training next month? Coming here, even though I thought it was a lot of money because I manage the money in our business, seeing what my husband brought back, seeing it for myself, hands down worth every penny. It’s an investment.

When my husband showed up back at the office after being here in September, I saw the light in his eyes and the changes that he is anticipating to make, plus the changes that have been made. Here’s a great way to put it. We were working hard every day, and it’s hard work, but we were making no progress. Now we work hard every day but we can see progress. That’s what’s making the difference. I can’t give you a number but I can tell you over the next year we’re going to save hundreds of thousands of dollars. We have confidence that where we’re going is the right direction.

Of course the ultimate goal is to grow our business. We’re at three million right now. We’re hoping to grow to ten million in ten years. That’s not something we can’t reach, but I think right now the savings is where we’re making our money. We didn’t realize how much we were losing, but now that we are stopping and thinking about the processes, we’re going to save a ton of money. I would say give it a try. Just like Mike said when we showed up, if you don’t like it at the end of the day, I’ll give you everything back. It is worth a try.